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The cover of "Trash," by self-published author Thom Simonson. An ad for the new eBook was rejected by Facebook.

It’s often said don’t judge a book by its cover.

For one New York author, that’s exactly what happened when social networking giant Facebook rejected an ad promoting his new electronic short story — or eBook — called “Trash.”

To be fair, “Trash”, a fictional work by 40-year old Thom Simonson, sounds like…well, just that — a trashy story complete with what even the author calls a “provocative” cover of a nearly nude woman covering her breasts.

The eBook cover image was incorporated in the banned social website ad.

“Thanks for advertising with Facebook,” stated an Oct. 4 email from the Facebook Ads Team to Simonson. “We have reviewed your ad(s) and determined that one or more of them do not meet our guidelines.”

Although Facebook referred Simonson to several resource links on the company’s website, they failed to provide a direct appeal process and advised as the only option to change the ad image and re-submit it.

“The image included in your ad is not suitable to appear on Facebook,” the company said.

A review of Facebook’s published advertising guidelines includes a section on Community Standards.

“Ads may not contain adult content, including nudity, depictions of people in explicit or suggestive positions, or activities that are overly suggestive or sexually provocative,” the company explains.

The controversial image was also blocked by Facebook on Simonson’s personal profile, but according to the author was left up on the page he created promoting the eBook.

A double standard?

For Simonson, the issue isn’t about disputing the characterization of the image, but rather how Facebook unfairly singled his ad out for rejection while allowing similar images to be displayed by the site’s more mainstream accounts such as Maxim and Victoria’s Secret.

“I started looking at other things, people that tend to use sexuality in frivolous ways in order to advertise and I came up with Facebook pages that had full-breasted women who were scantily clad,” Simonson said recently in an exclusive interview with Big 3 News.

“I felt that was kind of a double standard. The issue there seems less like the Community Guidelines and more about, ‘well, these guys definitely have bigger advertising budgets.’”

Simonson argues that the cover image he used is relevant to the content of his eBook, and Facebook erred during the ad review process.

Big 3 News contacted Facebook for a response to Simonson’s concerns, but as of press time the company has only responded with an automated message.

“Thanks for contacting Facebook,” the company said in response to our Jan. 21 interview request. “We understand that you may be on a deadline and will do our best to respond as quickly as possible.”

Simonson has no plans to resubmit the ad with a different image.

Trending eBooks

Beyond the cover of “Trash”, where the electronic pages are laid bare, it’s obvious the teaser image is a creative branding technique employed by Simonson to entice readers to something meatier (more on the story below).

Independent authors like Simonson have a daunting task in the digital age — not only do they craft their stories but they must also act as editors and publishers while finding a way to distribute their content.

This includes obtaining a copyright and ISBN number for their work, finding a cover image that they own the rights to or have purchased online, and uploading their content to online distributors like Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.

“All that stuff is on me,” Simonson explained.

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However, most online distributors offer a user-friendly, step-by-step process for making the content available to consumers.

“It really is as simple as writing your story in a word document, and then uploading to them,” Simonson explained. “The online forms that Amazon and Barnes & Noble use are pretty step-by-step. You can preview the book before it actually goes up to make sure what is going to be delivered to people on their e-readers is what you intended.”

The distribution sites check the upload over to make sure all the essential information is correct, but it is not checked for content.

“It goes live on their site, and pretty much from that point on you can sell,” Simonson said. “You are paying them a commission in terms of a percentage of your income per copy for that.”

Brooklyn Rules, by Thom Simonson.

Simonson, also the author of “Brooklyn Rules” about life in Brooklyn, New York — available as an eBook and as a audio memoir — says that while six-month sales for “Trash” are modest he is hopeful that will change as he navigates the world of marketing his published material.

“I’m kind of picking up ways to promote it as I go along, because there’s only so much mileage you get out of your social network,” the author said. “The responses I have gotten to it from people who are leaning in the direction of that kind of fiction have been good. But there’s a difference between selling stuff to your friends and the general populace actually having access to it.”

Under the (book) covers

Simonson’s suspenseful 15-page “Trash” eBook, available for $0.99 at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, tells the story of a photographer who risks her personal safety to document women victimized in an unusual way — each of them was scarred through a medical practice called breast donation surgery.

The procedure makes the women what Simonson calls “metaphoric” trash, a phrase that describes the book’s underlying theme that the women are being paid and used for what they contribute and then being thrown away.

The photographer at the heart of the story, Amanda, has the courage to share the women’s trauma through pictures.

“Amanda looked with disbelief at the shambles that used to be her studio. Fear rushed down her arms, sending her hand into her shoulder bag to find the canister of pepper spray. Her eyes swept over the open drawers with their contents spilling out, cameras tossed on the floor, lights knocked over and files
spilled all around her desk….” – opening scene from “Trash.”

The inspiration for the book — the notion of living organ donors — is based on existing medical technology that is in the experimental stage.

“As the story unfolds, you realize that these women she photographed were all involved in a process where medical technology has advanced a little bit further than it is right now, and they are actually able to create replacement organs for people.”

Simonson, who has worked in the social services field for more than 15 years, says the current medical technology doesn’t create new organs but uses donated body parts. Doctors can then transplant them to individuals who need them virtually rejection-free.

“I saw that as an opportunity, when there’s technology out there that people can use, some people are going to use it for the greater good, like growing kidneys,” Simonson said. “Some people are going to use it with the thing they can most profit off of.

“One of the most profitable things right now in the medical establishment is plastic surgery,” Simonson added. “I kind of brought the whole breast implant thing into it, and women having these natural breast implants, because they’re using transplanted tissue and looking at both sides of that, what is the effect of people donating their breasts?”

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